"Winterschläfer" (Winter Sleepers, 1997, adapted by writer/director/composer Tom Tykwer before the international success of "Run Lola Run" from the novel Expense of Spirit by Anne-Françoise Pyszora) shows that Tykwer did not just recently fall in love with helicopter space-cam shots (the DVD of "Heaven" includes more that he shot and did not use in that movie). They are too ravishing for me to blame the too-slow setting up of multiple intersections of four lives (and two deaths) in the Bavarian Alps in "Winterschläfer.".

Having now seen the three films in German that Tykwer made before "Heaven," he seems the best possible choice to have filmed the screenplay of "Heaven" that Krzysztof Kieslowski did not live to shoot. The screenplays that Tykwer wrote and directed have the same fascination with chance (events that would have turned out differently a split-second earlier or later) as Kieslowski (constantly risking judgment of "contrivance"), and the characters in Tykwer films are not villains or heroes, but mixes of good and bad (and more than a little strangeness). The character who dies near the end of "Winterschläfer" does not deserve to die. The character who causes that character's death is mistaken about most everything. There are obstacles to identifying with any of the characters (as in other Tykwer films and, indeed, in many German movies and many Kieslowski ones, too).

The movie stars with the nurse Laura (Marie-Lou Sellem, who is always dressed in green) returning (from who knows where) to the very large ski lodge home she inherited. Also living there is romance-novel translator Rebecca (Floriane Daniel, always dressed in harlot red), whose loutish, jealous boyfriend, a ski instructor named Marco (Heino Ferch) has made the place a mess.

While Laura is at work, Rene (Ulrich Matthes, who played Goebbels in last year's "Downfall"), who works as a movie projectionist and snaps and develops a lot of photos, walks by, sees Theo banging Laura, and that Marco' has left the keys in his car. Rene drives it away. A mournful-looking farmer, Theo (Josef Bierbichler, the clairvoyant Hias in Herzog's Heart of Glass) hooks up a trailer to take a sick horse to a vet. Unbeknownst to him, his daughter stows away in the horse trailer.

Distracted by a walkie-talkie call from his sons, Theo wanders into the wrong lane of the mountain road and is headed for a head-on crash with the (stolen) car Rene is driving. Theo swerves and both trailer and car flip, while Rene's plunges over the edge, but has a soft landing in the snow. I have gone this far into the plot to emphasize that the fault for the accident is Theo's. Neither Theo nor Rene remembers that. That's pretty much all the plot I want to reveal. There are multiple misunderstandings among those who spend time at Laura's home, with Marco behaving badly on multiple occasions, and Rene always tolerating his behavior.

The visual style (with the roving shots of master cinematography by Frank Griebe, who has shot all six Tykwer feature films and his 1990 short "Because") is compromised by a mediocre print and cropping (from 2.35:1 to 1.85:1). Tykwer's somewhat mournful, somewhat techno score comes through fairly well. The English subtitles are optional. There are no DVD extras, which is particularly regretable in that Tykwer is completely fluent in English and has many interesting things to say on the DVDs of his three later films that I've seen.

The deliberate pace did not foreshadow the hyperkinetic "Run, Lola, Run," but does foreshadow "Heaven," which I also think is overlong (but which has far more interesting characters) and The Princess and the Warrior. There is a lot of camera movie and many striking visual compositions in all four of the Tykwer films I've seen, along with haunting music by Tykwer (sometimes, but not here, supplemented by Arvo Pärt). There was promise in "Winterschläfer," though it is, no doubt, easier to see in retrospect after promises have been fulfilled by greater accomplishments.

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A review of "Heaven" is forthcoming, as is my list of best post-WWII German movies.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD